DEAR Editor,-
Councillor George Henderson’s suggestion that we fix our own potholes and claim the costs from those who should be doing it, will win him support from every motorist, ratepayer and most taxi drivers in the Ray Nkonyeni Municipality.
On the same page that you published his letter last week, was another from a motorist who had demolished two of his car’s tyres after hitting a pothole. He needed assistance, and got it from fellow motorists, without which he would have been stranded.
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Does our RN municipality care about potholes? Apparently not. If it did, it would be fixing them as they appear and also not use people so unqualified that, within a year, the holes reappear.
Where I live on the beachfront in Ramsgate, irritating potholes have been filled by residents who use a bucket of stones mixed with quick-drying cement and a shovel.
In our street, the municipality dug a trench across the road to lay a pipe and never returned to re-tar the surface. The closest homeowner, with the assistance of his gardener, filled the trench with cement and for the last three years all residents have been driving over it without a problem.
Around the corner, the municipality resurfaced a cluster of potholes just last year. Guess what? The tar is cracking and a hole big enough to do serious damage has appeared.
A few houses down, a pensioner resident filled in a hole with cement outside his house before the municipality fixed the potholes at the bottom of the road.
His repairs are intact (I drive over it every day) while dodging the municipally-repaired potholes.
This raises the question: Do our pothole repairs have a shelf life? Are they designed to last only a year? Does this tactic guarantee a constant income for the contractor?
Instead of trying to hide behind a declining budget, it’s time the RN council started treating our rates and taxes as would any business in decline – reduce overheads and boost income.
That would mean cutting back on the ridiculous council wage bill (mentioned by Clr Henderson) and improving service delivery to the source of income – ratepayers and visitors.
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Both want an uninterrupted supply of clean water, safe roads and clean, functional and well-policed beaches. The council will ignore these demands and Clr Henderson’s observations about its inadequacies, not to mention the treasury, at its peril.
The result will be bankruptcy, which is what happens when revenues (rates and taxes) decline due to infrastructure collapse and running costs (wage bills) increase.
Then nobody gets anything – including councillors.
ROGER MAKINGS
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